reading

The only thing more interesting than the truth is fiction dressed up as the truth.

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned the last page of the book and closed the cover, Norah's connection to the writer felt absolute. It was a breathless, consuming rapture....

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.

She must have been very anxious about a first boy friend to fall in love with a Colgate boy

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

A romance book is designed to tell you something about love__ts ability to endure, forgive, go the extra mile, care about someone, put someone else first.

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect.

The only thing better than a well-read book is a well-read book only read by yourself.

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!